


Different Tracks Now

by MintSauce



Series: The Halfway House [6]
Category: Shameless (US)
Genre: F/M, Fiona POV, Fiona fucks up, M/M, the halfway house continuation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-09
Updated: 2015-04-09
Packaged: 2018-03-22 03:23:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,532
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3712978
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MintSauce/pseuds/MintSauce
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fiona didn't know how she could have gotten it so wrong, but she has. She's learning now, but it's possibly too late. </p><p>Part of my Halfway House series.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Different Tracks Now

Fiona tried.

She got Liam back when she could. Debbie and Carl she’s done what she can for. Lip’s never needed her help. Ian though, Ian she’s never known how to talk to. Even before they were separated, he was just this untouchable presence. He just faded into the background, never owned up to having a problem until it had already passed.

Nine years old and he solved everything himself.

And if he didn’t, he went to Lip.

Even that wasn’t true anymore.

She remembers the first time that they’d all been back together since social services had stepped in. It had been this amazing feeling building in her chest, love or hope or just _something_ that Fiona couldn’t name. It had been so good to see them all.

Fiona remembers Ian, sitting quietly on the side-lines, just watching them all. He’d often done that before, but there’d been an edge to it this time. And then, when he’d admitted to not being in a foster placement. She’d gone to comfort him and only realised later that the expression on his face hadn’t been asking for it.

He hadn’t cared that he didn’t have a home to go back to. He didn’t care that it had only been a crappy room in a crappy place Ian referred to as a Halfway House. At first she’d assumed it was because he was missing them, his family.

She’d been wrong.

She spotted the mark on the side of Ian’s neck once when he was thirteen. Poorly hidden and scabbing over in that way a wound always looks when it’s been reopened one too many times. The teeth marks are clear. Clear enough that she could probably match them up perfectly to someone’s dental records.

It’s just another thing that Ian isn’t telling her.

“ _He’s got this friend… Mickey something. He’s a fucking psychopath, Fi. I’ve been here five minutes and he’s already dragged Ian into a fight. He’s not… he’s not the same Ian. It’s fucked up,”_ Lip had told her all those years ago. And even if the words hadn’t hit her like a punch, it would have been the tone of Lip’s voice that really would have driven it home.

He’d sounded terrified.

And Fiona knew he was thinking exactly what she was, _where did we go wrong?_ But really, how could they have stopped it? Without being there, how could they have protected Ian from any of this?

She’d told herself Lip would talk some sense into him. Sweet, innocent, quiet Ian. Ian who wouldn’t hurt a fly. That was the Ian that she knew existed deep inside and that was the Ian she trusted Lip could draw back out again.

It was the Ian they could find again eventually. This Mickey person couldn’t stick around forever right? That was what she told herself.

The last two years before Ian turned eighteen were the worst. He didn’t call, he didn’t write and when he did come to visit them, he was even more closed off than usual. He wasn’t the usual quiet, kind Ian. No, instead he had been replaced by this angry, brooding arsehole that no one wanted to be around for any extended period of time.

It got to the point that whilst assuming that Ian was going to be moving into the Gallagher house when he turned eighteen, Fiona was starting to doubt if that was the best idea. She’d love to have her little brother around more, but that still didn’t change the fact that she didn’t know how to handle him.

She didn’t even know when Ian had become something that needed to be handled.

Of course, it’s only years later that she gets it out of Lip why Ian had been like that for two years. Mickey. It always seemed to come back to Mickey. Mickey being there, Mickey not being there. Mickey Mickey Mickey.

She cursed the day that Ian had been placed in the same room as that boy. Still, she had to admit, sometimes the lesser evil did seem to be having Mickey there. Not that she would admit that out loud.

She can remember when Ian turned up on their doorstep, two weeks after he’d turned eighteen and with a giant smile on his face. He’d picked Debbie up, spun her around and when questioned on his good mood had just shrugged and said, “ _Life’s looking up now.”_

“ _Mickey’s got an apartment_ ,”was what he’d said when she’d asked him where he was staying now.

It had been a horrible moment when she’d rung Ian on his birthday, half expecting him to just turn up on their doorstep and he’d just laughed and smiled and said nothing about living arrangements. She’d been too stunned to ask him what he was doing. She sort of regrets making him feel like maybe he didn’t have many options.

Any other options than Mickey.

Still, she hadn’t thought it would be long term.

She was wrong.

It’s snowing when Fiona realises just how wrong she’s been all this time. Nothing good ever seems to happen in the snow. She’s already bundled up tight, so many layers that she feels stiff and uncomfortable. She just wants to get home, to where its warm(er) and where she can maybe lie down for a few hours before the stress of the next day begins.

The streets are practically deserted. Only the foolish are outside right now.

She’s one of them.

Ian and Mickey are two of the others.

She sees them across the street. She spots Ian of course, that flaming crop of red hair like a beacon. His face is also bright red with the cold and it’s almost instinct to go over there and yell at him, tell him to put a hat on for fuck’s sake. _Doesn’t he know he could catch his death like that!_

She doesn’t know its Mickey with him at first. She’s never met Mickey before, only ever heard Lip’s damning descriptions. Still, she pauses and watches as the shorter guy moves towards her brother, pulling the hat off his own head and jamming it down so hard onto Ian’s that it covers his eyes.

Ian laughs, a bright, amazing sound that has Fiona moving closer. She’s pulled like a moth to this brilliant flame she’s only just noticed flickering. “You’re gonna get cold,” he says, lifting a hand to take the hat back off, only to get jabbed sharply in the ribs by the other guy.

“Don’t even fuckin’ think about it,” he says, tugging the edge of the hat back down again. “What’s mine is yours and all that bullshit. Keep it on your fucking head.”

Ian laughs again and that’s already twice more than she’s used to hearing him do it. Fiona suddenly feels like a terrible sister. She feels inadequate in this. She can’t even make her own little brother laugh.

“We married now, Mick?” Ian asks, catching the edge of the other boy’s overlarge coat and tugging him closer.

This is Mickey, Fiona realises.

Ian is gay, Fiona realises.

Ian and Mickey are in a relationship, Fiona realises.

She definitely needs to lie down now. But it only cements what she’d already known. She’s messed up somewhere, because Ian should feel like he can trust her. He should feel like he can come to her with this. But he hasn’t. He hasn’t told anyone.

What does that say?

She needs a stiff drink, Fiona knows that much.

“Fuck off,” Mickey says. He doesn’t protest when Ian dips his head to kiss the side of his jaw and again, moving up towards his ear.

Ian must say something else judging by the look on Mickey’s face, but the words are spoken too low for her to hear. She doesn’t think she’d want to anyway.

“Let’s go home,” Ian says, already tugging Mickey in the opposite direction that they were walking.

“Thought you wanted smokes.”

“Fuck that,” Ian laughs and just like that he’s dragging Mickey away. And Mickey’s letting him, a slightly incredulous, but entertained expression on his face.

Fiona wonders how long this has been going on.

She watches them walk away and it feels like she’s missed a moment, but really she wouldn’t have been able to interrupt. From a distance, they seem kind of sweet. But then, Ian had been sweet all those years ago, before Mickey. She’s not a good enough person to forgive him for warping Ian like this.

He was barely eighteen. A childhood romance couldn’t possibly turn itself into anything more substantial.

 

*****

 

After that, it takes a while for Ian to bring Mickey around to meet them.

At first its just as a friend and then the years crawl by and another and another until Ian’s twenty-three and introducing a surly Mickey as his boyfriend. Like they didn’t all already know. Ian practically had heart eyes when he looked at the other boy.

Mickey never looked up when he was around the Gallaghers long enough to return them.

It’s been another two years since then and it’s just been fight after fight. Fiona won’t be ashamed of trying to make Ian see how much better he could do. He could have the whole world if he wants. He could have anyone. Someone so much more worthy of his love than a trash collector with crude knuckle tattoos and an attitude problem.

“Fucked for life,” she’s heard Mickey refer to himself as.

Why would Ian want to be with someone with an attitude like that?

She just wants the old Ian back; she’s ready to be done waiting around for him.

 

*****

 

“Ian, this is Danny,” Fiona says when Ian walks in half an hour late, Mickey trailing just behind him. “He’s a friend of mine from work.”

He’s also hella gay and with an affinity for gingers – but that’s not the point.

_(it’s totally the point)._

“Hey,” Ian says, hardly looking at him. Which is a shame really, because Danny’s good looking. He’d kind, he’s sweet, he’s everything you would want in a boyfriend. His jaw is also looking like it’s about to rest on the table at the sight of Fiona’s little brother.

See, she knew she couldn’t go wrong with Danny. Now she just has to get Ian to look away from Mickey long enough to notice him.

“You want a beer?” Ian asks, twisting around to look at his little thug of a boyfriend. One who after all this time still looks dead set on trying to fade into the background. You would think he would at least attempt to make an effort after all these years, but no.

Mickey scoffs. “Obviously.”

Even the way he talks to Ian, part condescension, part arrogance sets Fiona’s teeth on edge.

“So Ian, what do you do with yourself?” Danny asks when they’re all sat down around the table, cozy as you like.

Fiona made sure they were sat opposite one another. She’d tried to put Mickey a little further down the table, next to Carl maybe. Typically, he’d slammed himself down in the seat beside Ian so fast she thought he might have given himself whiplash.

“I work in a gym,” Ian says.

Fiona blinks. “I didn’t know that. What happened to the bartending?”

“I quit and got a new job,” Ian says bluntly, more focussed on trying to stop Mickey trading all of his peas off for some of Ian’s meat.

He taps the back of Mickey’s hand sharply with his knife and starts juggling their plates around for a moment.

"You make sure geriatric viagroids don’t burst a nut leering at the younger generation,” Mickey says. “That ain’t a proper job.”

Ian whacks Mickey upside the head. “It pays more than the last one, dickhead,” he says. “And if all I have to do all day is say, “You alright there, Sir?” and ignore the odd woody, I’ll do it.”

Mickey rolls his eyes. “Couldn’t pay me enough to let some old fuck rub their junk all over me.”

“That’s not what happens, Mick.”

“Whatever.”

Ian just looks amused, setting his plate back down. He’s taken half of Mickey’s peas in return for passing off a handful of carrots and the fatty edge of his meat. Mickey looks pleased with himself, the previous conversation apparently forgotten in favour of picking up the fat with his fingers and sucking it down.

Down the table, Debbie makes a disgusted sound. Fiona can’t blame her.

“Danny works with me at the diner, Ian,” she says when there’s a lapse in conversation next.

Danny looks up and smiles at her, then turns his eyes on Ian hopefully. Ian doesn’t look up from his plate. He’s trying to shovel the food in as fast as he can it seems, barely even pausing to chew. Can he not afford to eat living with Mickey?

She really wished he would come home.

“You’ve said that already,” Mickey says.

Fiona ignores him.

“What is it you’re studying to be again?” she asks Danny.

“Biology, I want to be a teacher,” he supplies helpfully, all wide smiles and doe eyes. Ian still hasn’t looked up, but his spine has snapped straight. They’ve got his attention, she thinks.

"Isn’t that– ”

“I’m not going back to school,” Ian cuts her off. He looks up and there’s a fire in his eyes, an anger that she’s been seeing more and more often. An anger that hadn’t ever used to be there. It shouldn’t be there. Anger like that doesn’t have a place in her brother. Lip was the one who blew up like a rocket when he was angry, Fiona knew how to handle that.

Ian had always been the slow burn type. And this anger was still that, in a way. You could just never tell with Ian how long something had been brewing. That was the problem.

There were a lot of problems.

"That’s not what this is, Ian,” she says.

The rest of the table has gone quiet. Almost deathly so.

“Then what is this?”

He’s still pinning her with that look. The one that makes her squirm. The one that makes her feel like he’s staring right through her, like he’s digging out all of her secrets. It’s a stare that she doesn’t know how to handle, like so many things about him.

So she just caves, lays it all out on the table.

“Danny’s gay too, you know,” she says.

Just like that, Volcano Ian erupts.

He slams his hands down on the table so hard that the place settings jump. Drinks knock over, one gushing liquid straight into Fiona’s lap. She can’t concentrate on that though, not when Ian’s picking up his plate and throwing it over her head.

It smashes off the wall.

 _Had he meant to hit her?_ She doesn’t know.

“Hey!” Jimmy shouts, jumping to his feet a second too late. Spurred into action by the way Lip rises, eyes wide as they watch the gravy drip down the wall.

“Fuck you,” Ian spits at her.

Fiona still hasn’t moved a muscle. Like a deer in headlights, she’s just frozen there.

“Hey,” Jimmy says again, reaching out a hand towards Ian’s shoulder.

He winces when Mickey’s fingers clamp down around his wrist. “Don’t fucking touch him,” he says. Low. Dangerous.

The complete opposite of Ian’s explosive anger. Mickey’s anger is different. It’s worse somehow.

“Fuck you,” Ian says and storms out.

Mickey follows with a smirk tossed their way, of course he does.

And Fiona still hasn’t moved.

 

*****

 

“Why won’t they just let me be happy?”

Fiona’s in the kitchen, trying to wash the food off her shaking hands. She can hear Ian’s voice through the back door. It’s slightly ajar, obviously not having shut properly after Ian slammed it.

She would have thought they’d have been long gone by now, the pair of them. But no, when she edges closer, she can see them through the sliver.

Ian is hunched over on the steps, back bent, head in his hands. He keeps tugging at the short strands of his hair. Mickey’s sitting next to him, cigarette in his fingers, just watching.

“Why can’t they just accept the one thing that makes me happy?”

He sounds distraught. He sounds broken.

That much is all her fault.

Mickey sighs. “Gallagher, they’re allowed not to approve. Did you really think they would? I’m a bin man with a record and no easy future laid out for me. Of course they’re going to want you with some preppy, clean-cut teacher-wannabe college graduate.”

 _Of course they did_.

“That’s not what I want.”

“That’s not the point.”

Ian makes a sound low in his throat and throws his hands up. “It should be. I want you. I’ve always wanted you and I always will want you. How am I supposed to have them in my life if they won’t even try to see that?”

Mickey edges closer, hands across the smoke and for a while they just sit.

Fiona doesn’t think they’re going to say anymore and if they did, she’s not sure what she’d want them to say. Lip comes up beside her, touching her elbow. When she turns, he has a finger pressed against his mouth.

It occurs to her then that maybe what’s she’s listened for, what they’re both listening for is what they really need to hear. She hasn’t been able to understand Ian for years. That’s exactly the problem. She keeps trying, but it’s like they’re not even on the same tracks anymore. He just isn’t the same person.

“They just want you to come home,” Mickey says eventually.

Ian scoffs. “ _Home_ ,” he says. “This house hasn’t been home since I was ten. They all moved out, got different homes, different families and then came back to this one. But, home is you and me. Home is our flat. Home was the Halfway House.”

He turns and looks up at the building behind him. The look on his face is heart-breaking, but it’s also the most open that Fiona has seen Ian in a long time. Since he was ten-years-old maybe.

“This isn’t my home anymore. And they need to stop waiting for ten-year-old me to come back. I’m not that kid anymore. How could I be?”

Ian collapses in on himself, spine shaking as he breathes in heavy lungfuls of air that aren’t quite sobs, but could be. He leans into Mickey, presses his face into the base of the other man’s throat and just falls apart. Mickey doesn’t even look phased, he just strokes Ian’s hair and presses his mouth to Ian’s temple.

He says nothing.

“I love them, but they love a person who doesn’t exist. They haven’t even tried to get to know me now.”

And they haven’t, have they?

She can see the answer as clear as anything on Lip’s face. She supposes it’s probably mirrored on her own. They’ve been waiting for the old Ian, the sweet, innocent, quiet Ian. The steady, dependable child that just blinked solemnly as he climbed into the back of the social services van. He hadn’t looked back at the house then, Fiona remembers, not like the rest of them had done.

Maybe that was the point.

Maybe even then, Ian knew that home for him would lie outside of these walls. That family could mean something different than _Gallagher_.

Fiona loves her brother. Loves him fiercely, with everything that she has. But it doesn’t change the fact that she doesn’t know the man that the child she sang to sleep once has become. She hasn’t even tried.

She’ll probably always hate herself for that.

“Take me home, Mick,” Ian says in a small voice.

Mickey nods and Fiona can’t watch as he leads her brother away. She’s probably screwed up royally tonight. Ian probably won’t forgive her. He’d be within his rights. They don’t know where he lives, what gym he works at even. How would she find him?

The answer is, she couldn’t?

She’ll just have to hope he’s willing to mend the bridges that they’ve all been unknowingly burning. She leans into Lip and they don’t say anything. They both just stand watching the space where Ian had been sitting, the step he fell and chipped his tooth on once, the step he had his first cigarette on, the step where he’d been sitting when they came to take him away. The step they might have seen him for the last time sitting on.

Fiona knows she’ll have to be the one to reach out. And she will, she’ll ring him when Ian’s cooled down and Fiona’s found a way to forgive herself in a small way. She’ll ask questions she’s been avoiding, she’ll find out about the man her brother’s become and she’ll fix this relationship before she can truly break it beyond repair.

They have time, but it’s always been true that the things worth it take the most.

She’ll learn how to be Ian’s family again. And she’ll maybe even learn to accept the new one he’s found for himself. Maybe.

(Probably not.)


End file.
